1,000 Watercolor Paintings Animate Tidelands' 'Holy Grail' Video

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1,000 Watercolor Paintings Animate Tidelands' 'Holy Grail' Video

Japanese illustrator Ami Kutata spent four months creating 1,000 watercolors to animate Tidelands' new music video, "Holy Grail." The trippy clip unfolds as a journey through a medieval-meets-steampunk village that's occupied by thumb-size citizens, a queen, an archer and dripping celestial orbs of unknown origin.

"We gave her complete creative freedom," Tidelands guitarist Gabriel Leis said in an e-mail to Wired.com about the making of the video.

Kutata is not fluent in English, so Tidelands singer Mie Araki translated the lyrics into Japanese. "Ami got really attached to the line in the song that goes: Over-dignified is just another way to compensate for what you've lost,' Araki said. "That became her main inspiration for the images of a traveler, the queen and the dwarf town."

San Francisco duo Tidelands' debut album *If ... *, featuring accompaniment by MagikMagik, will be released July 26.